Actuate BIRT Analytics summary of features, benefits, architecture, deployment options and system requirements. For more information about Actuate BIRT Analytics, please visit: http://www.actuate.com/products/birt-user-experience/analytics/

1. Product
Rich Internet Applications Without Limits© Brochure
Actuate Analytics Option
Actuate Analytics extends the Actuate Enterprise Reporting Application Platform
by providing web-based Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) capabilities to power
users, business analysts and management. Actuate Analytics empowers these
users to interactively explore information, to build insightful, multi-dimensional
reports and to facilitate good decisions while giving IT control over access to the
underlying data sources.

2. Product Brochure: Actuate Analytics Option
Overview Actuate Analytics enhances the Actuate Enterprise
Reporting Application platform through its unique
Actuate Analytics extends the Actuate Enterprise ability to deliver personalized cubes and reports to
Reporting Application Platform by providing thousands of information consumers, arming them
web-based Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) with the power to make strong, competitive business
capabilities to power users, business analysts and decisions.
management. Actuate Analytics empowers these
Actuate Analytics is packaged as a new option to the
users to interactively explore information, to build
Actuate iServer, which includes cube manufacturing,
insightful, multi-dimensional reports, and to facilitate
scheduling, delivery, and manipulation using the
good decisions while giving IT control over access to
included, Actuate Analytics Viewer. The Actuate
the underlying data sources.
Analytics Designer, which creates the definition, or
Business operations need not only to know what profile, of an Analytics cube, is available separately.
happened, but also to understand why it happened,
what factors might have contributed to the result and
what decisions can be made to improve it. Actuate
Analytics allows users to find trends, compare time
periods and find patterns in, as an example, sales
performance by product line. It can compare fund
returns by eligibility, graph store sales by product by
date, even show month-over-month growth in sales
of green patio furniture in the southwestern region.
Actuate Analytics enables better, quicker, more
effective business decisions throughout
the organization.
Spanning the enterprise is Actuate Analytics’
strength. Unlike traditional ivory tower OLAP
products, Actuate Analytics introduces large user
communities to multi-dimensional analysis and
reporting through the use of personalized cubes.
By personalizing both the cube and the viewing
interface, Actuate Analytics is able to present an
OLAP experience that is tailored and scoped to the
right level for each user, and thus is able to present
analytic information to a larger user community. IT
controls the user interface and data access rights
while leveraging the renowned strengths of the
Actuate iServer—scale, security, and reliability.
2

3. Product Brochure: Actuate Analytics Option
Features and Benefits Actuate iServer Integration Scales To Thousands
of Users
Actuate Analytics extends the Actuate Enterprise Actuate Analytics introduces a new, scalable
Reporting Application Platform, empowering an approach to multi-dimensional data distribution.
expanding audience of users with self-serve analytics. Traditional Multi-dimensional (MOLAP) solutions
It delivers interactive, multi-dimensional analysis and create and host hyper-cubes on the server, allowing
reporting over the internet, allowing power users and analysts access through a client or browser. This
information consumers to get more insight and value allows small groups of users to access large volumes
from their enterprise data. Key benefits are: of data, but it does not provide for large numbers
of users to participate in the analysis. Actuate
• Self-serve analytics delivering high adoption without
Analytics combines the server-side cube construction
prerequisite training
of MOLAP with the personal productivity benefits
• Actuate iServer integration scales to thousands of
of Desktop OLAP (DOLAP) products. When an
users over the internet
Analytics user initiates a session, a copy of the data
• Offline Mobility improves personal productivity and
and the cube analyzer, the Analytics Cube Viewer,
increases information utility
are sent to the user’s browser, and all subsequent
• Low total cost of ownership (TCO)
processing occurs at the user’s PC. This architecture
• Companion to Actuate e.Analysis
frees the server to attend to thousands of users,
Actuate Analytics is an integral member of while each user enjoys fast, consistent performance
Actuate 7, providing seamless navigation from without the concern of client-server issues such as
cube to spreadsheet to report and leveraging the concurrency, load and network latency that often
power, performance, scale and control provided slows productivity, forcing users to wait through each
by the Actuate iServer. Its purpose-built internet page refresh following every mouse click.
architecture delivers numerous, and often unique
benefits when included in Enterprise Reporting Offline Mobility Improves Personal Productivity
Applications hosted by the Actuate iServer and and Increases Information Utility
accompanying solutions created with Actuate’s Actuate Analytics offers each user the unique
e.Report Designer Professional, e.Spreadsheet and ability to work offline with their own personal
Actuate Query family of products. cube. This translates into improved productivity
for sales and marketing analysts, frequent travelers
Enables Self-Serve Analytics Without and telecommuters. Working offline provides the
Prerequisite Training freedom for users to browse the cube during non-
Actuate Analytics delivers rich, robust OLAP business hours—even on airline flights—time that
capabilities–slice and dice, filter, sort, hide, can improve the familiarity with the information and
calculations, drill to details and more. Analytics the quality of the analysis.
is distinguished by an intuitive approach to data
analysis that requires no costly end-user training and Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
ensures a high adoption rate. IT controls the depth Actuate Analytics provides an unmatched low total
by which a user can interact with the data by setting cost of ownership with no training requirement,
which features are exposed by the Analytics Cube minimal hardware infrastructure, high user scalability
Viewer. End-users can work in varied presentation and low maintenance and administration.
formats, online or offline and export to Excel, PDF,
or other desktop products for continued analysis
or data redistribution.
3

4. Product Brochure: Actuate Analytics Option
Self-Serve Analytics Without Prerequisite Training mappings to categories, and measures to be
Actuate Analytics delivers the functionality to explore created in the cube. The Cube Designer includes
and analyze large volumes of data by any analyst, an easy to use query editor to retrieve information
but equally as important, it propagates the insights from relational data sources. The editor includes
derived from this analysis to thousands of users drag and drop table and column manipulation,
across the internet, all at the same time. parameterization, direct SQL access, and data
preview capabilities.
• How Actuate Analytics Works
• Actuate Analytics Cube Designer IT then defines the hierarchical structure of the
• Actuate Analytics Cube Viewer categories, adds transformations, calculated
• Advanced Analysis measures and measure summaries and establishes
the formats for values, colors, and the presentation
How Actuate Analytics Works of the cube. The Analytics Designer can also build a
In order to deliver large amounts of data to large cube directly, allowing designers to rapidly prototype
numbers of users, Actuate Analytics first pre- and test their solutions, reducing development time
packages the source data into highly compressed and costs.
multi-dimensional data files called cubes. These
cubes capture the data in hierarchical categories,
keeping track of the parent-child relationships and
how measures or values roll up at each parent or
summary level. Cubes are defined using the Analytics
Cube Designer and published and generated by the
Actuate iServer. Cube compression ensures that the
data can be analyzed and reports can be viewed at
each users PC, freeing up server resources to address
requests from thousands more users.
End-users access cubes through Actuate’s Active
Portal or from within their enterprise reporting
application. Once selected, the cube, its reports
and Actuate Analytics Cube Viewer are sent to the
browser where the user explores and analyzes the
data, using rich OLAP functionality to discover key
insights to support their business decisions. As that
user explores, they create snapshot reports that can
be saved both locally and back to the iServer. These
cube reports can then be shared with everyday
information consumers allowing them to benefit
quickly from the analysis.
Actuate Analytics Cube Viewer
Actuate Analytics Cube Designer The Actuate Analytics Viewer combines common
The Actuate Analytics Designer is a Java application data analysis features with a dynamic interface so
used by IT to create the definition of a cube, called that users with a wide range of analytic experience
a profile. A cube profile contains the source data can easily navigate and explore their data. The
location, query and structure definitions and Analytics Viewer then lets users create, save and share
cube reports with other users. The Analytics Viewer
4

5. Product Brochure: Actuate Analytics Option
includes the analytic features one would expect to
find in an OLAP tool, including the following:
• Expand and collapse to go up and down the hierarchy
of categories
• Expand to level to go directly to known data
• Stacked categories (4 deep on each axis)
• Drag and swap (pivot) rows and columns
• Display measure as a value, or % of row, column, or
grand total
• Sorting, including Top n and Worst n
• Filters (including pattern filters)
• Hiding
• Table, chart, and graph data visualizations
• Calculations / functions
• Drill to detail source records
• Link to other cubes, reports, and web applications
• Integrates with Microsoft Excel and Word, Adobe
Acrobat
• Undo / Redo (last 10)
Advanced Analysis levels. This allows the user to compare results for
Canada (country) at the same time as California
Additionally, the Actuate Analytics Viewer offers
(state) and Chicago (city).
numerous features that go beyond standard OLAP
and that greatly contribute to its fast adoption by Category and subcategory filtering—Display only
users without any prerequisite training. the selected subcategories, even crossing category
levels, to expose only the data that matters.
Save reports—Reports, or perspectives of the cube,
can be saved by the analyst and by each individual Exception highlighting—Show high and low
user. These reports can be revisited in subsequent performance results (top ten). Apply business rules
cube sessions, or later, with new cube data. to focus attention on particular categories and
measures and quickly identify trends or issues.
Presentation choice—Report data can be displayed
in the format best suited to the analytic need or Relative time periods—Create reports such as
to user’s preference. The Analysis view offers rich Fiscal Year to Date and subset data using relative
analytical capabilities, while the Presentation view is time periods. Define the selection once (e.g. current
a format designed for familiar high-impact displays month) and apply it, independent of changes in the
and re-distribution. report.
Experience levels—Pre-defined or customizable Email integration—Send the current report to others
experience levels tailor the interface to the user’s as an email attachment—Excel, Word, Adobe PDF, or
skills, or the application need. The default levels are flat file.
Standard, Novice and Advanced.
Work offline—Save a copy of the cube and viewer
Category display—Users can choose hierarchical locally, and continue the analysis completely
or columnar display to enhance readability, and can disconnected from the network.
simultaneously show categories open at different
5

6. Product Brochure: Actuate Analytics Option
Actuate iServer Scales to Thousands of Users
Profiles, cubes, and reports are stored as objects in
the Actuate iServer Encyclopedia and the capability
to manage these objects is provided through the
iServer Management Console. As a result, Actuate
Analytics leverages all common services available in
the iServer—scalability, security, scheduling, web-
services integration, notification, delivery, versioning,
logging, and maintenance.
The Cube Factory—The Actuate Analytics Option
adds the cube generation engine, called the
Analytics Cube Factory to the iServer. This factory
is a multi-threaded, scalable engine that generates
highly compressed cubes from the definition in
the cube profile. Cube profiles are published to the
Actuate iServer through the Analytics Designer or
the Management Console. Using the scheduling business hours—even on airline flights—time that
capabilities common to all Actuate products within can improve the familiarity with the information and
iServer, cube generation can be scheduled to occur the quality of the analysis.
at any time. The resulting cube output will be stored Advanced integration—Advanced Actuate Analytics
in the encyclopedia where it can be accessed and installations can combine all of the specialization
shared with other users. techniques mentioned above to deliver a truly
Persistent and transient cubes—Cubes can be dynamic Enterprise Reporting Application.
scheduled or be generated on demand. When in Enterprise Reporting Application users can request
Active Portal or a custom application, a user simply specific dimensions and measures from within a web
clicks on a URL that references a cube profile, and application and submit a request for analysis. In the
the cube is generated on-demand. This cube can background, a dynamic cube profile is created that
be transient (temporary) or persistent (cached) and invokes a parameterized SQL query which passes the
stored in the encyclopedia. user’s data access privileges as a parameter.
Then, the on-demand cube is generated, while a
Cube parameterization (SQL)—When defining a branded, novice-level Analytics Viewer is delivered
cube profile, IT can parameterize the SQL query to the user along with the new cube. Included in
that returns the cube’s data. This is accomplished the Viewer is a default Cube Report that displays
by defining an external query file that is referenced a table that includes the dimensions and the first
inside the cube profile. So during a cube creation measure in the request. This custom scenario can be
process, for example, specifying “South” as a repeated thousands of times per day, depending on
parameter value would restrict data to that region. the application.
Offline Mobility Improves Personal Productivity Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
and Increases Information Utility
The ability to tailor and integrate the end-user
Actuate Analytics offers each user the unique experience makes Actuate Analytics a very
ability to work offline with their own personal compelling addition to the Actuate product family.
cube. This translates into improved productivity
for sales and marketing analysts, frequent travelers, Embedded Analysis—Actuate Analytics offers
and telecommuters. Working offline provides the seamless integration with Enterprise Reporting
freedom for users to browse the cube during non- Applications simply by including URLs that refer to
6

7. Product Brochure: Actuate Analytics Option
information in the iServer. The Information Delivery for that cube. These reports are also published to the
API, a SOAP-based, web services interface can iServer, are refreshed as the cube data is refreshed,
schedule cube builds, retrieve cube reports, and are available for consumption by thousands of users.
and manage cube access rights—anywhere URLs
The root difference in the two products is the
are supported including web pages, applications
sourcing of the data, the control over the cube
and reports.
definition, extensibility, and the ability to save and
Private branding—The Analytics Viewer supports share reports from that cube. The table above
private-branding to meet an organization’s specific compares the two products.
corporate and distribution requirements, or to
integrate seamlessly into existing applications.
Microsoft Analysis Services—The Actuate Analytics
Viewer connects over the network to cubes defined
with Microsoft® SQL Server Analysis Services. Access
is provided using Microsoft’s OLE DB for OLAP
(ODBO) standard, and is governed by a profile specific
to Analysis Services. Organizations can use this
capability to create very large cubes that summarize
large volumes of information, across many
dimensions and measures. This feature is limited to
the Microsoft Windows platform.
Companion To e.Analysis
Actuate Analytics provides a powerful complement
to Actuate’s e.Analysis, delivering a common interface
to users of each product as they explore and analyze
their data.
e.Analysis provides a powerful interactive
visualization capability for Actuate e.Reports and
Actuate Query results. After reviewing the results in
a standard report, users can invoke the e.Report’s
Smart Search feature to initiate an e.Analysis session,
selecting the columns of data to be analyzed directly
from the report. e.Analysis automatically constructs
a cube based on the selected data and delivers the
viewer and the new cube back to the user. e.Analysis
is an ideal complement to Actuate Analytics as
e.Analysis can facilitate ad hoc exploration to help
users define new cubes and new cube reports to be
formally developed and delivered by Analytics.
Actuate Analytics is more formal in its purpose
than e.Analysis. Typically, IT or a power user will
design what might be a complex, multi-dimensional
summary of large amounts of data, and then
schedule the Analytics cube creation. This cube will
then mature as users define, share, and refine reports
7

8. Product Brochure: Actuate Analytics Option
Feature Actuate Analytics e.Analysis
Data source RDBMS, XML, applications, flat files, e.Report Data, Actuate Query
MS Analysis Services Results
Cube definition Cube Designer provides granular Automatic
control over Cube Profile
Extensive OLAP Analysis Yes Yes
Report definition Cube Viewer builds and saves reports Export view to MS Office
Work offline Yes Yes
Save reports Yes No
Schedule Cube Yes No
Customize Viewer Formats, branding, colors, experience Colors, branding, formats
levels
Integration Embed in Enterprise Reporting Embed in Enterprise Reporting
Applications, drill to detail Applications
navigation, Web-services scheduling,
parameterized SQL, adaptive cubes
System Requirements
System requirements vary with options chosen. For a
system analysis based on your specific needs, please
contact an Actuate expert at 1-800-914-2259 (US &
Canada) or contact us by email. You can also contact
one of our offices worldwide.
For More Information
To get more information about interactive Web
reporting, please contact an Actuate expert at 1-800-
914-2259 (US & Canada) or contact us by email. You
can also contact one of our offices worldwide.
Actuate Corporation Tel: (888) 422-8828
2207 Bridgepointe Parkway Web: http://www.actuate.com
Suite 500 8
San Mateo, CA 94404